Owen Gleiberman

Even more than the first “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion” is a thriller wrapped in a deception tucked inside a riddle. It is, of course, a murder mystery with multiple suspects, but it’s one that comes with byways and flashbacks and bells and whistles, not to mention two whodunit homicides for the price of one.

What’s profound, and incendiary, about “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the way that Laura Poitras excavates the story of how deeply Nan Goldin’s photographs are rooted in trauma.

“Weird,” it turns out, isn’t a real biopic. It’s a movie that does to the biopic form what Weird Al did to songs like “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” and “Beat It” — imitates it, razzes it, throws mud at it, turns it inside out. And all with supreme affection.

With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?

Hill wants to “do justice” to each of these people, but the result is that Dead for a Dollar doesn’t have a dramatic core. It has actors we like to watch, doing what they do well (like Waltz playing a civilized badass), but it isn’t structured so that any of their fates gets a rise out of us.

The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.

Most of The Whale simply isn’t as good as Brendan Fraser’s performance. For what he brings off, though, it deserves to be seen.

Bones and All is a concept in search of a story. The film doesn’t draw us in. It stumbles and lurches and seems to make itself up as it goes along. You may feel eaten alive with boredom.

So why is “Bardo,” for all its skill, reach-for-the-stars aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confounding, and — okay, I’ll just say it — monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it’s three hours long and mostly it’s full of itself.

The movie is breathtaking — in its drama, its high-crafted innovation, its vision. It’s a ruthless but intimate tale of art, lust, obsession, and power.

As a movie, White Noise announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them.

Samaritan is basic enough that it often plays like a video-game film in which someone forgot to add the CGI. But the movie builds to a very good twist, and Stallone, in his way, brings a vibe to it, complete with an ’80s kiss-off line (“Have a blast!”) delivered in a growl so deliberate it practically etches itself into the scenery.

13: The Musical is just catchy enough to make you forget how facile it is. It’s not greased lighting, but it glides right along.

Fall is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.

Orphan: First Kill is draggy and suspense-free. Fuhrman, as before, invests her role with a cold creepiness, but the minimal, haphazard script sticks her with playing Esther as a one-note mascot of terror, somewhere between Freddy Krueger and Leprechaun.

At heart, though, it’s a knowingly eccentric goof of a movie, to the point that it’s hard, for a while, not to find it agreeable, even as you register what a preposterous piece of fluff it is. Unfortunately, it’s also an arduous piece of fluff. It’s full of blow-you-away action scenes, and it’s also full of rules — a satirical vampire cosmology that’s fun, until it starts to be just convoluted enough to give you a headache, especially when the rules are applied as inconsistently as they are here.

It’s a processed confection that has come off the streaming assembly line. Yet if the comedy here is mostly routine, the romance is another thing. It really does work, because the actors don’t just phone in the love story — they dance with it, commit to it, and own it.

So how could this be a responsible movie? In the following way. “Alex’s War” is not a piece of pro-Jones propaganda. It’s closer to a piece of media-age vérité that assumes we know what the facts are, and that we don’t need to have our hands held as Jones spews forth his red-pill view of reality.

As an alien-attack thriller, Prey is competent and well-paced, though with little in the way of surprise. But the journey of Naru lends it a semblance of emotional coherence that most of the “Predator” films have lacked.

“Nightclubbing” is a raw inside slice of punk nostalgia and punk history.

“Dreaming Walls” sets out to capture not the history of the Chelsea, or even the experience of the people who’ve lived there, so much as the afterglow of the Chelsea. The aging residents it shows us can check out anytime (or get kicked out), but they can never leave.

The deceptions and symmetries are standard, but this is the kind of movie that rises or falls on whether the actors can carry the duplicity — and the innocence — aloft. And the actors here are marvelous: tart, stylish, emotionally vibrant, never more knowing than when they’re being duped.

The movie, in its conventional and likable way, knocks the stuffing out of superhero fantasy. Its joke is that a mangy crew of animals doing outlandish CGI magic tricks is essentially what a comic-book movie is.

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.

“Paws of Fury” is an efficient yet underimagined animated fable that barely musters the flavor of a cliché Western comedy.

Where the Crawdads Sing is at once a mystery, a romance, a back-to-nature reverie full of gnarled trees and hanging moss, and a parable of women’s power and independence in a world crushed under by masculine will.

It’s the mix of tones — the cheeky and the deadly, the flip and the romantic — that elevates “Thor: Love and Thunder” by keeping it not just brashly unpredictable but emotionally alive.

Fourth of July is a trifle, and a facile, easy-to-watch one. But what it’s offering under the surface feels, in part, like a clandestine defense of Louis C.K.’s transgressions. In about 45 minutes, the family swings from being louts to saints. That’s supposed to be a lesson to us all. It’s not a convincing one.